Music - from 'Sahara' to 'The New Seattle'
In the form of the Highland bagpipes, customarily wielded by a man in a kilt, Scotland’s music is the best-known emblem of its national identity. And if the bagpipes are taken to represent the wider body of traditional and traditional-based music, then Scottish claims to worldwide recognition in this respect are well-founded indeed.
On the other hand, the reductive identification of ‘Scottish music’ with Scottish folk music (folk music being defined by Western canonical hierarchies as inherently subordinate to classical or ‘art’ music) has often served as a pretext for downgrading Scots’ accomplishments in other musical spheres – but those times are fast a-changing.
In his 1980 historical study
Scotland’s Music, the composer Cedric Thorpe Davie, former professor of music at the
University of St Andrews, described Scotland as a ‘musical Sahara’ in classical terms - a country, furthermore, that ‘had not, until near the present century, made any significant continuing contribution to music as a conscious and deliberate art.’
Until recently, this reflected the prevailing orthodoxy on the subject, as summed up by one of its leading historians, Kenneth Elliott, in that pre-eminent reference bible,
The New Grove Dictionary of Music: ‘Any account of music in Scotland must inevitably be halting and fragmentary, not only because of the ravages of time and the lack of sources, but also because of powerful and even destructive political, religious and social factors.’
Key among these factors were the perceived anti-musical ideologies of the 1560 Protestant Reformation, followed by the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and of the Parliaments in 1707, which between them, it is argued, removed from Scotland much of the socio-economic infrastructure – particularly royal and aristocratic patronage – required for musical creativity to be sustained.
During the last 15 years, however, this long-settled consensus has been increasingly under attack, on a number of fronts. It’s not only in Scotland that classical music’s privileged status as the touchstone of a culture’s calibre and value has lately been contested, but the depth and strength of Scotland’s traditional music heritage has rendered such debates especially lively here.
Taking Thorpe Davie’s criterion of ‘music as a conscious and deliberate art’, for instance, it’s hard to imagine anything that fits the bill much better than the masterly, 250-year-old Gaelic pastoral paean
Moladh Ben Doran, whose author, a Highland forester named Duncan Ban MacIntyre, could neither read nor write, and thus composed the piece’s entire 500 lines in his mind, before reciting them to be transcribed. Not for nothing did the renowned musicologist Alan Lomax hail Scotland’s Gaelic song tradition as ‘the finest flower of Western Europe’, and innumerable other examples of such artistry in a traditional context could be cited in rebuttal of Thorpe Davie’s view.
Nor is it only in historical terms that such issues are being contended, as was vividly demonstrated in the recent furore over the future of
Scottish Opera. Shortly before the national company’s latest financial crisis hit the headlines, an (admittedly unscientific) opinion poll in the broadsheet daily
The Herald reported that 31 per cent of Scots favoured increased public funding for traditional music (after 35 per cent for theatre), while only four per cent and two per cent respectively came out in support of classical music and opera/ballet. And while accusations of philistinism against
Scottish Executive paymasters certainly dominated the media debate that ensued, the contention was nonetheless robustly made from some quarters that Scotland has no indigenous opera tradition, and would be better devoting its public resources to art forms more logically deserving of local support.
Even within the classical sphere, a growing body of recent scholarship has questioned the ‘Sahara’ view, pointing out that Elliott’s ‘lack of sources’ does not necessarily mean that such sources never existed (and meanwhile uncovering an array of new ones). Other commentators have drawn the debate wider, challenging the smoothly progressive, Germanic-dominated model of the European music to argue, for instance, that, ‘contrary to the received canonic view that “Nationalism” in classical music began in central Europe in the mid-19th century, it actually began in Scotland in the 18th century.’
Whatever the historical arguments – and long may they flourish – classical, orchestral and chamber music seem largely to be sharing in Scotland’s overall sense of cultural upswing today. The national orchestras regularly win praise for punching above their weight, both in revisiting core repertoire and programming more modern work, while Scotland itself can boast several notable contemporary composers. Some of the latter – along with a growing number of orchestral players – have also participated in a burgeoning sub-scene of cross-fertilisation between different genres, to which the small and close-knit Scottish musical community seems particularly conducive.
Although still dwarfed by the major London and Anglo-American players, Scotland’s jazz, rock and pop sectors are also in excellent health for their size and relative lack of heavyweight infrastructure. In recent years the Glasgow art-rock band Franz Ferdinand have seemed to carry all before them; in 2004 they spearheaded a concerted showcase invasion of Scottish acts at the influential South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, going on to win one of the UK’s top music awards, the Mercury Prize. Their phenomenal success also helped to draw attention to a wider swathe of current Scottish rock and pop oufits, prompting
Time magazine in that same year to feature Glasgow in a series on ultra-hip ‘Secret Capitals’, likening it to Detroit in the 1960s or Seattle in its 1990s grunge heyday.
Scotland’s jazz artists may still have to ply their wares in London before the media or industry takes any notice, but many of them have been doing just that, taking on the UK capital’s coolest haunts and audiences at their own game and winning widespread praise for their freshness and originality, as well as winning several major media awards.
All in all, there’s a strong case for arguing that Scottish music today collectively represents the largest, most dynamic and furthest-reaching source of energy and creativity on the country’s entire cultural scene.
